"I usually reccomend Zalman, they are a little pricey (but not obscene)"

zalman is the most expensive next to maybe thermalright

i am a long, long time zalman user and i've owned the 7000, the VF-700 and tons of other zalman heatsinks and fans, but the price of the 9500/9700 was too much

i would go with the classic Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7, the easiest to install (no backplate, lightweight (less strain on mobo), easy release pins), the least expensive and a very good cooler, not as good as the massive 120mm heatsinks like thermalrights and scythe or zalman, but DEFINITELY the best bang for buck.

ah, then swing for the retail cpu with the retail HSF, the stock HSF that comes with the E6600 would do just fine, if you are going to OC later you can lap the stock HSF to help it out a bit... it's actually a pretty good performer... the only other decent alternatives are the zalman 7000/7700

both have EIST support and C1E support that change the speed of the processor to help reduce power, you'll also want to look at the E6420 or E6600 as good middle of the road processors

typically speaking you'd be lucky to find raid 5 on the p965 platform, so you're natural starting point would be the nforce 650/680 chipset, the 650 chipset is common to have (4) RAID 5 ports, whereas most of the 680 supports (6-8) RAID 5 ports, but at an added cost (~50-100 more)

Quote :

"I was wondering if the onboard video supported 1680x1050 resolution, due to an LCD I am thinking of buying. Anyway I can find this out?"

yes it will support the LCD, but because of the extra resolution, your performance will suffer... this is physics and happens to all graphics cards.... essentially the more pixels the card has to display the greater the performance hit.... i guess "support" should be a relative term

what's the difference in price at the boards you are looking at? it will require that you get a SLi compatible video card... (and later another card for the second slot)

with the current power available in the newest video cards I don't think you would see a huge huge jump in performance really... unless you are planning on using 2 or more monitors or something like that...

Then there are idiots like me who try to get high scores on 3dmark 06 by buying all the latest hardware and running it in sli. It's not always for practical use, but I tell ya when Crysis comes out, everyone will need all the power they can get. That game is going to be wicked.

I'm definitely interested in overclocking, but nothing crazy or dangerous. What can I reasonably expect without needing special cooling hardware?

I'm using that as my starting point and I'll build from there. Anybody got suggestions for a good PSU and Memory? I was going to stick it out for one of slickdeals' specials on RAM, unless there is something decent that's not too expensive regularly.

i'll tell you what you won't be OC'ing that far with that motherboard, no mosfet cooling, sub-par NB/SB cooling... but 650i is a good chipset to start with... 6320 is good too

but in all honesty since it's rated for 1333mhz w/ manual OC (mine is MSI and it's the same way)... i was able to manually OC straight to 1333mhz fsb w/out a voltage increase, so likely since the 6320 is at 7x267, you should be able to go straight to 7x333 making it OC to 2.33Ghz w/out any voltage increase.

Should do the trick. I'll be ordering the CPU and mobo this week too, so hopefully I can migrate these new parts into my existing P4 system, though I don't feel too good about how the 250w PSU will fare... I don't hold a lot of hope, so it looks like one of those is in my future too.

Advice needed:I am looking to build a gaming/video editting comp. Right now I am looking to get 2 evga 8800GTS 320mb vid cards sli'd with a Rosewill rx750-d-b 750watt psu. I'm just lookin to get something that will last a good 1.5yrs for me. I have heard that multiple gpu's get worn out quick, or are usually just a waste.. So.. Should I stick with this or just go for a single 8800GTX? Also, do I need to get a better psu? Something like 900w.. or higher..?

^indeed. The 8800gtx evga ko edition is what i have. It's about on par with the new 8800 ultras in terms of performance and it's alot cheaper. The 320 meg edition can't handle higher resolution displays very well. 4 gigs of ddr2-800 is defin the way to go too. Just remember xp32 bit doesn't handle any more than 2 gigs per application, which can be changed, but only up to 3.xx i think. For 4 gigs, run either vista 64 or xp 64.

Any of the newer games will require SLI to max out the settings at resolutions of 1920x1200 or 2560x1600. A single 8800gtx will do alright on medium settings at these resolutions, but if you really wanna turn everything up, sli is the only way to do so.

http://www.tomshardware.com is a good source for benchmarks and GPU comparisons. They give single/sli benchmarks for the newer games and at different resolutions. So you can get a feel for what card you need and what games it'll run at good frame rates.

Put all your information in there and it'll give you a pretty good rough estimate. It's probably the best online watt calculator out there. Sli configs can vary, it just depends on what cards you're running. Obviously dual 7950gx2s (in quad sli) or dual 8800gtxs will draw more power then a couple 7600s. The important thing is having the same card for sli though. I'm pretty sure you need the same clock speeds on each card too, but don't quote me on that.

I'm still researching what I want to put together as a rig, and i doubt I'll be making purchases until September or October.

What is going to happen to processors by then? Is Dual Core --> Quad Core? Should I just wait on those prices to come down? What about overclocking options? Will mobos be changing drastically between now and then?